Underage marriages down, so are cases of spousal violence

NEW DELHI: Even as it indicated a decline in underage marriage, data released as part of the National Family Health Survey-6 (2023-24) showed that 20.1% women - in the 20-24 age group - surveyed were married before 18 years, the legal age of marriage for women. This marks a decline of a little over three percentage points when compared to NFHS-5 (2019-21) when this was 23.3%.

For men - in the 25-29 age group - 15.9% had married before 21 years, the legal age of marriage.

This marks a 17.7% decline from the 2019-21 survey.

On gender-based violence, the report said the percentage of married women aged 18-49 years who experienced spousal violence declined from 29.2% in 2019-21 to 22.3% in 2023-24. However, a much higher percentage of rural women (24.4%) faced spousal violence compared to 17.5% urban women. This figure stood at 24.2% for urban and 31.6% for rural in 2019-21.

Meanwhile, the prevalence of underage marriage, now at 20%, has witnessed a decline over NFHS rounds - it was 26.8% in 2015-16 (NFHS-4) and 47.4% in 2005-06 (NFHS-3).

The 2023-2024 survey showed a wide gap in terms of the percentage of underage marriage among women in rural and urban India - 23.3% for rural and 11.4% for urban. In the 2019-21 survey, it was 27% for rural and 14.7% for urban India. The variation - rural and urban - was stark for men too.

While 19% of men in rural India married before 21 years of age, this figure was 9.7% in urban India.

In 2019-21, this was 11.3% for men in urban areas and 21.1% in rural areas.

The report also brought into focus the percentage of women in the 15-19 years age group who were already mothers or pregnant at the time of the survey. This was nearly the same as the last survey at 6.7% In case of gender-based sexual violence, the data showed that women aged 19-29 years who had experienced such violence by 18 years of age accounted for 0.7% of those surveyed, and this was down from 1.2% in 2019-21.